Face it, Emmy, you’re no Oscar

What? Fox’s fun but potholed and excruciatingly corny “24” is up for a drama series Emmy, and “The Wire,” an extraordinary HBO crime hour that ranks with the best television ever, isn’t?

They’re b-a-a-a-a-ack. Once again come nominations for the Emmys, television’s annual thundering belch of gaseous self-praise that matters to only the dolled-up, high-fiving industry and the critics writing about it.

Like, yes, the one you’re reading right now.

Thursday’s nominations set the stage for yet another feelgood pantheon of cosmic hair, high-wattage frozen smiles and red-carpeted designer name-dropping from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. This one airs Sept. 21 on Fox.

Contrasting with the older, equally indulgent Oscars, which retain a surface luminance that transcends the baggy-pants 15-year-olds who turn out for most of today’s movies, the Emmy race invites no awe and very little passion.

The reason is not a quality gap, big and small screens having about the same percentage and imbalance of triumphs and clunkers. The gap is in the genes.

Unlike theatrical movies, which historically carry an allure of something dreamy and almost unattainable (like that famous clip of a young Judy Garland serenading a photo of Clark Gable), TV is America’s furniture, a remote-controlled companion in your house that delivers the same old same-old around the clock. Try picturing a girl singing “You Made Me Love You” to a photo of William Petersen of Emmy-nominated “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”

Movie stars loom bigger than life, TV stars about life-sized, until they become movie stars. Not much glitter or glam for the Emmys themselves either, nor much suspense, with major nominees often showing up again and again like worn cards in a Rolodex.

The latest list of yadda yaddas follows that tradition. Before missing Thursday’s cut, in fact, “Law & Order” had received 11 consecutive Emmy nominations. It’s been a rocket of a show that deserved more than its single Emmy. But year after year for it and the others (“Cheers” and “MASH” were other members of the 11-straight club)? Good for them, tedious for TV consumers.

It’s no wonder that few of us recall who won what and when. The public’s interest is elsewhere. Trot out some celebrities on Emmy night, and viewers are content to ogle them and leave it at that. Winners are irrelevant to everyone outside the industry, everyone but....

TV critics!

You want outrage? Here is outrage:

Talk about addictions, I never miss an episode of Jack Bauer racing the clock in “24.” Style and suspense? Yup. But it also got ever sillier last season, its script flaws ever larger, the misadventures of low-I.Q. Kim ever more like “The Perils of Pauline.” The difference is that Kim would tie herself to the tracks. This represents the best of television?

In contrast, tune in Showtime’s vastly superior crime series “Street Time” when it returns for a second season next month. It’s dynamite.

And take a look at “The Wire,” which is not just fresh and bracing but unique and heroic in its nuanced portrayals of cops and criminals in Baltimore. No omnipotent superhero here. Instead, the characters are complicated, the writing dense, the directing and acting stratospheric.

Was there resistance to having a third HBO series join worthy “Six Feet Under” and “The Sopranos” as nominees in the drama series category? Or do Emmy voters just not get it?

But I don’t hold a grudge. The enterprise can redeem itself on Emmy night by rewarding HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” as best comedy and Tony Shalhoub as best lead comedy actor for his work in USA’s “Monk.”

It better happen that way. Like Jack Bauer’s, my patience is wearing thin.

*

From Emmys to Kobes

And the winner isn’t....

The TV Academy’s New York-based sister organization -- the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences -- also announced nominees for Emmys this week, in news and documentary categories. Something you can count on: There won’t be an Emmy nomination in 2004 for TV news coverage -- network or local -- of the Kobe Bryant case.

Here was KNBC misleading viewers when teasing its 11 p.m. newscast Wednesday: “Kobe Bryant as you have never seen him. The Laker star goes public tonight.”

Oh, please.

The message was that Bryant would speak out about his situation. What followed instead was footage of him attending the Espy Awards with his wife. Oh, well, anything to get people to watch.

Actually, there is no Kobe case, as this was being written, just the customary media frenzy and a 19-year-old Colorado woman’s charge that she was sexually assaulted by Bryant, which he denies. So far, prosecutors have not filed charges.

Not that they haven’t been pushed to do so by hyperventilating media, some of which were scrambling this week to locate “friends” of the alleged victim. KNBC located a supportive one and on Wednesday interviewed her in Eagle, Colo.

That came after NBC’s “Today” and ABC’s “Good Morning America” had gone in depth with their own sets of supportive “friends,” with “The Early Show” on CBS again getting the leftovers.

After “Today” and “Good Morning America” scored, imagine the CBS News panic over the “The Early Show’s” failure to deliver. You can almost hear the hysterical directive that must have gone out to show bookers: “Get us some friends, too!!!!”

Which surely explains Tuesday morning’s Hannah Storm satellite interview with a pair of young Coloradans advertised as “two people who’ve known [the alleged victim] for years.”

With “friends” like these....

Said the man about the alleged victim: “She’s a little on the ornery side. She’s not as innocent as she’s made out to be.” Storm asked for details. “I don ‘t really want to get into it,” he replied. “It’s more into personal stuff.”

The woman agreed, saying the alleged victim “had an ornery side when she got around her girlfriends.”

Just how intimately did these two know her? The woman said she’d known her since kindergarten (Quick, interview their kindergarten teacher!) but mainly when they were cheerleaders together as high school juniors. The man said that he wasn’t “personally attached” to Bryant’s accuser and knew her only through others.

Which was good enough for “The Early Show,” which was interested only in warm bodies to fill a slot.

But that wasn’t the end of it, as Storm now dragged them through another minefield: Did they believe Bryant or his accuser? “I would lean toward believing Kobe is innocent,” said the woman, who doesn’t know Bryant. “I believe Kobe is innocent ... based on his past character,” said the man, who also doesn’t know Bryant. “He’s had a flawless record his entire life, and the same can’t be said of her,” he added. Based on “personal stuff” he can’t get into, that is. If only there were Emmys for ignorance and innuendo.

*

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.